SARATOGA SPRINGS — “The Unpopularity of Popular History: A Scholar’s Pursuit of Non-Scholarly Things” is the title of the 2014 Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture, to be delivered by Skidmore Professor Gregory Pfitzer at 8 p.m. Wednesday, February 26.
The event will be hosted at no cost to the public in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.
Pfitzer, former chair of Skidmore’s Department of American Studies, is currently the Douglas Family Professor in American Culture, History and Literary and Interdisciplinary Studies. He will discuss his 30-year ongoing interest in “popular” history—typically offered by journalists, fiction writers, and artists, among others—and “professional” history, as written and practiced by credentialed scholars. He studies how various genres rise and fall, and how popular history has changed over time. Said Pfitzer, “At some point we take all history on faith, although certain standards are used to determine what did or did not happen.”
According to Pfitzer, pictorial histories influence people’s perception of history, even when the pictures are grossly inaccurate. As an example he cites the Revolutionary War episode when Gen. George Washington crossed the Delaware River in 1776 in a surprise attack on Hessian soldiers based in Trenton, New Jersey. Extremely risky and shrouded in secrecy, the event was immortalized in a painting created in 1851 by German American artist Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. His image depicts a bold general standing in a boat loaded with troops laboring to cross an ice-clogged river. The painting contains numerous historical and physical inaccuracies—Pfitzer calls it “over the top.” Yet it remains an iconic image for many Americans.
He added, “Often, cinematic treatments of historical events resonate with people, even as professional historians object to such treatments.”
Selection as the Moseley Lecturer is the highest honor the Skidmore faculty can confer upon a colleague.
